Physicists in Million-Euro Molecular Movie
14 August 08
A "molecular movie" revealing the behaviour of proteins and enzymes is to form part of research by a team of University of Strathclyde scientists - funded by a grant worth 1 million euros from the European Research Council.
The leader of the research team, Dr Neil Hunt, an EPSRC Advanced Research Fellow in Strathclyde's Department of Physics, won the prestigious award against tough competition from more than 9,000 other bids, with only around 300 successful applicants in total.
The group's work will use state-of-the-art lasers to show how proteins carry out their specific tasks in real time.
The research will use a modification of the transient 2D-IR spectroscopy technique which has been pioneered in the US and Europe but has yet to be practised in the UK. Known as SPRITES (Structure changes in Protein Reactions via Infrared Time Evolution spectroscopy), the experiment uses ultrafast lasers to allow physicists to see, in detail, changes in the structure of biological molecules.
Dr Hunt said:
"In many cases it's well-known what biological molecules do, but we don't know exactly how they do it. One of our main aims is to take a biological molecule, kick-start its machinery and watch it run in real time. For example, a protein might initially coil up into a helix-type structure, but if you slightly change the chemical environment around it, it will uncoil. These fast changes in shape are vital to the protein doing its biological job correctly.
"The idea of the project is to take snapshots of this change in structure - we use a laser flash to start the changes and another to effectively take pictures of the results. In this way, we can make a 'molecular movie' of what happens. It's exactly like time-lapse photography, getting the images frame by frame and then running them together to see the whole process."
The research group aims to develop this method further to study chemical reactions of enzymes, which act as catalysts for important biological reactions and hopes to use SPRITES to extend recent work on hydrogenase enzymes. This was carried out in partnership with scientists at the University of East Anglia, Max Born Institut in Berlin and the Lasers for Science Facility, based at the STFC Rutherford Appleton Laboratory in Oxfordshire, on models of the hydrogenase enzyme.
"The active site of this enzyme is a very efficient catalyst for hydrogen production" said Dr. Hunt. "If we can understand how it acts and make models, then it will lead to the development of new, more effective and cheaper materials for use in hydrogen fuel cells. We hope SPRITES will make a significant new contribution to this work and, in the long run, to the UK and European economies."
Source: www.nexxusscotland.com
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